” Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday that President Barack Obama had “disqualified” himself from the presidency over his foreign policy decisions – as the Louisiana Republican stood outside the White House after a meeting with the president.

Expounding on themes he laid out in a Fox News online op-ed this week, the possible presidential contender delivered a blistering attack on the president’s handling of the rise of Islamic State in the Middle East.

“ The president has really disqualified himself to be our commander-in-chief,” Mr. Jindal said, adding that the president had both failed to identify the threat radical Islam poses to the U.S. and failed to take the steps necessary to tackle the threat.”

Let’s face it , if you cannot recognize your enemy for what it is then you have no hope of being able to defeat that enemy . Of course some might say that to Obama this is a feature not a bug .

” Eleven Palestinians from the West Bank have been arrested on suspicion of attempting to carry out an attack on Israeli troops in the Hebron area and planning other attacks on Israelis, the Shin Bet security service announced Monday.

The Palestinians are from the Hebron area and are affiliated with Hamas, security forces said, adding that explosives and guns intended for use in the attacks were also found.

” The activity of this cell reflects the substantial threat from Hamas activity in Hebron, especially from militant operatives who have been arrested in the past and returning to the circle of terror,” the Shin Bet said in a statement.

One of the suspects – Salem Saltan, 28 – has been held in an Israeli military jail and in administrative detention.”

” The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve.

For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I’m growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That’s why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.

So please don’t insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current “leader of the free world” is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

For example, he has spent most of this week hosting an international conference on something called “violent extremism”. Whatever may be said of Munich, Chamberlain never hosted a three-day summit on “rearmament” in general whose entire purpose was to deny that “rearmament” and “Germany” were in any way connected. Yet that is exactly the message the United States government has just offered to the world – in between such eccentric side spectacles as Marie Harf, star of the hilarious new comedy Geopolitically Blonde, explaining her jobs-for-jihadis program, and the new hombre in charge of the planet’s mightiest military machine having his woman felt up on camera by Joe Biden. Now there’s a message to send to the misogynists of Burqastan about what happens when you let the missuses out of their body bags.”

Mr Steyn continues …

” But hey, what’s so odd about that? “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to “the fabric of our country” for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody’s fabric but instead tends to unravel it – as it’s doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with “violent extremists” is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don’t mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:

We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood.”

” The terrorists of the Islamic State (ISIS, for its acronym in English) released today a video showing the beheading of about 21 men, who identified as Egyptian Coptic Christians (Orthodox Christians)captured in Libya .

In the recording released by internet, looks at least ten men, with orange dress, kneeling with his hands cuffed behind his back , beheaded by his kidnappers, dressed in black. According to jihadist forums, a total of 21 hostages.

The video, five minutes long, is titled “A signed with blood to the nation of the Cross message” and is addressed to “the people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church” .According to the news agency AFP , the place where executions occur is Tripoli, the Libyan capital.”

This video and text comes from a Spanish language website and any syntax or grammar errors are the result of the auto-translation . For our Spanish speaking readers the original article may be found here .

” President Barack Obama stirred outrage with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, comparing the atrocities committed by ISIS to those of Christians “in the name of Christ.”

” Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

“So it is not unique to one group or one religion,” Obama said. “There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.” “

Does that mean that a thousand years from now we can expect a “kinder , gentler” Islam ? Seems to us that the world has already been waiting a thousand years for the Islamic “enlightenment” .

Who would have guessed that an American president would be Islam’s most ardent apologist ?

” Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual re­sponse to the jihad–a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language).5 Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The cru­sades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”6 “

” Protecting the United States from violent extremists requires creativity, hard work, and technological expertise. Here are a few of the more dire threats—and the counterterrorism technology to thwart them.”

Image: Robert Atanasovski/AFP/Getty Images

” War and revolution in the Middle East have opened military arsenals in Libya and Iraq to extremists and black markets. This is not good no matter what the bad guys buy, but it’s especially dangerous if terrorists get their hands on shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. Though many international flights avoid taking paths over known conflict areas where they might be at risk even at 35,000 feet, shoulder-fired missiles are portable and could be smuggled near enough to an international airport to do serious damage to planes during takeoff and landing. Missiles like the heat-seeking Russian Iglas, which are already in Iraq, can fire up to 11,000 feet in the air along a 2-mile-long corridor, making most airports viable targets. “

Image: Akradecki at en.wikipedia

” Systems that can protect airplanes from missiles do exist. Some U.S. military transport planes are already equipped with Directional Infrared Countermeasures (DIRCM) pods that can blind incoming missiles. A 550-pound pod mounted under the fuselage uses a laser to beam infrared energy into the missile’s heatseeker, overwhelming the sensor and causing the missile to lose its target. In the last decade two defense manufacturers, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman, made prototypes for civilian airliners. But they were too expensive to employ widely. The only way the airlines will ever consider them a good return on investment is if shooting down civilian airliners becomes a regular threat. “

Read more about future terrorist threats and the countermeasures fielded by the forces of civilization at Popular Mechanics

” The U.S. military and intelligence community now suspect that one of the five Taliban detainees released from Guantanamo Bay in return for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in May of last year has attempted to return to militant activity from his current location in Qatar by making contact with suspected Taliban associates in Afghanistan, multiple officials tell CNN.

The development has led to an ongoing debate inside the administration about whether there is a new threat from this man, and potentially the other four.

This is the first known suggestion that any of the detainees involved in the exchange may be trying to engage again in militant activity. It comes at a politically sensitive time as the administration has quickened the pace of prisoner release in an effort to encourage the closure of the Guantanamo, and the Army must decide in the coming weeks whether and how to punish Bergdahl for leaving his post .

Several U.S. officials across different agencies and branches of the U.S. government have confirmed key details to CNN. The White House referred CNN to the Pentagon. (Typical buck passing)

The officials would not say which of the five men is suspected. But an ongoing U.S. intelligence program to secretly intercept and monitor all of their communications in Qatar turned up evidence in recent months that one of them has “reached out” to try to encourage militant activity, one official said. The official would offer no further details.”

” The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.”

” Undeterred after previous depictions of Muhammad garnered threats from Islamic extremists, French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo was the site of a terrorist attack last week that left 12 dead. Despite the violent incident and worldwide attention it received, the outlet’s surviving staff members proved this week that even such a calculated attack will not cause them to retreat from their mission.

Attorney Richard Malka spoke on behalf of the magazine ahead of the release of its first edition after the deadly incident.

“ We will not give in,” he said, “otherwise all this won’t have meant anything.”

The phrase , meaning “I am Charlie” in English, has been the rallying cry of free speech supporters around the world. Venerable American cartoon series The Simpsons included a scene featuring Maggie Simpson holding such a sign in its latest episode.

” In an apparent ‘honor killing’, a 25-year-old pregnant woman was brutally beaten and stoned to death on Tuesday outside the high court here by her father and brothers for marrying the man of her choice.

Police said Farzana Parveen, resident of Faisalabad, had married Mohammad Iqbal of Jaranwala a few months ago against the wishes of her family.

The incident happened as the couple reached the court premises to record Farzana’s statement to defend her husband against allegations by her family that he kidnapped her and forced her to marry him.

After failing in their attempt, nearly 20 members of her family, including her father and brothers, attacked the couple with sticks and bricks before a crowd of onlookers in front of the high court of Lahore, said police official Naseem Butt.”

” The FBI has revealed that they now know the identity of the American known as Misha who helped radicalize the Boston bombing suspects.

Family members of dead bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev have described Misha as the guiding influence in the elder bomber developing radicalized views.

Speculation as to who Misha is has varied wildly in the past week, with some suggesting he is the mastermind behind the marathon bombings while others believe he could be a Russian spy – sent to identify and keep tabs on young men like Tamerlan who are at risk of turning to militant Islam.”

However, the FBI did not know of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s trip to a region of Russia dominated by Islamist violence, The Hill reported, because an airline misspelled his name on a flight manifesto given to the U.S. government.

“Yes, the system pinged when he was leaving the United States. By the time he returned, all investigations — the matter had been closed,” Napolitano said.”

” The TSA was created to replace the patchwork of private security companies that handled airport security in the pre-9/11 era. Its budget quickly ballooned: Since 2002 the number of TSA agents has risen from 16,000 to more than 50,000. Still, to a traumatized public, any amount of overreaction in the name of preventing another terrorist attack seemed acceptable.

More than a decade later, it’s time to move on. For one thing, the attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is out of proportion to the relative threat it presents. Since 2000 the chance that the death of a U.S. resident resulted from a terrorist attack was 1 in 3.5 million, according to John Mueller and Mark Stewart of Ohio State and the University of Newcastle, respectively. Out of the 150,000 murders in the U.S. between 9/11 and the end of 2010, Islamic extremism accounted for fewer than three dozen. In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 annual deaths worldwide, outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq—the same number, notes Mueller, that occur in bathtubs in the U.S. each year.

Yet the TSA still commands a budget of nearly $8 billion—leaving the agency with too many officers and not enough to do. The TSA’s “Top Good Catches of 2011,” reported on its blog, did include 1,200 firearms and—their top find—a single batch of C4 explosives (though that payload was discovered only on the return flight). A longer list of the TSA’s confiscations would include a G.I. Joe action doll’s 4-inch plastic rifle (“it’s a replica”) and a light saber toy. For all the face cream, breast milk, and live fish that vigilant screeners collected in airport security lines last year, the TSA didn’t spot a single terrorist trying to board an airline in the U.S. ”